“Fracking” is the slang term used for hydraulic fracturing, a process by which the gas industry injects a slurry of unknown composition into a gas well in order to break up the rock and release the natural gas contained within. At present, the EPA exempts fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), but Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado has introduced legislation into the House (H.R.2766) to force the EPA to regulate fracking. In response, the gas industry has pushed back with studies that purport to show that regulation is both unnecessary and costly.

The gas industry claims that there is already sufficient regulation and oversight of fracking at the state level. The ProPublica article contests this claim, pointing out the following:

In fact, the report calls for some of same measures found in the congressional bill the industry is so hotly contesting.

Regarding fracturing in areas close to the surface or near shallow aquifers, the report reads: “States should consider requiring companies to submit a list of additives used in formation fracturing and their concentration.” It also says that shallow fracturing very close to certain drinking water aquifers “should either be stopped, or restricted to the use of materials that do not pose a risk of endangering ground water and do not have the potential to cause human health effects.”

The additives issue is specifically addressed in HR2766, just as the ProPublica article says:

In subparagraph (C) of paragraph (1) insert before the semicolon `, including a requirement that any person using hydraulic fracturing disclose to the State (or the Administrator if the Administrator has primary enforcement responsibility in the State) the chemical constituents (but not the proprietary chemical formulas) used in the fracturing process’. (Section 2 (b)(1))

The bigger problem is that, according to the article, “21 of the 31 states listed do not have any specific regulation addressing hydraulic fracturing; 17 states do not require companies to list the chemicals they put in the ground; and no state requires companies to track how much drilling fluid they pump into or remove from the earth — crucial data for determining what portion of chemicals has been discarded underground.”

So much for “the states do a great job regulating fracking already.”

As to the cost question, the study that supposedly claims that the cost of complying with the SDWA is about $100,000 per gas well has a number of major flaws. For example, the study uses data that’s 10 years old, it estimates costs for tests that aren’t required by the SDWA, and the vice president of the group who did the study (and was interviewed for the ProPublica article) believes “that many of the processes listed in the report are already being practiced to a greater degree than they were in 1999, meaning that even if they were required they may not be additional burdens at all.”

An estimate produced by Deutsche Bank analysts found something radically different from the industry’s preferred studies:

If all the testing that Godec includes is factored out, the regulations would cost the industry just $4,500 per well, according to his report, or just six hundredths of a percent of the cost of establishing a typical new well.

The jury’s still out on whether fracking is a threat to water supplies (anecdotes are not data), but one thing is abundantly clear: the industry didn’t do itself any favors by misrepresenting and/or cherry-picking study data and findings in order to oppose federal fracking legislation.

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Can concentrating photovoltaic compete with solar thermal and standard photovoltaic?

Photovoltaic (PV) electricity is notoriously inefficient. The theoretical maximum for a simple PV cell irradiated by a single sun (equivalent irradiance) is 31%, which is less than half of the efficiency of the best coal generation. More complex PV cells rely on the absorption of multiple light frequencies or the concentration of solar energy to achieve greater efficiencies. While there have been some interesting recent developments in solar power such as so-called combined-cycle solar, these developments aren’t intended for utility-scale electricity generation. A new technology reported by Greenwire has the potential to provide gigawatts of electricity – concentrating photovoltaic (CPV).

The point of CPV is to make solar electricity cheaper. Compared to solar thermal (the concentrating of sunlight on a tower that boils water to turn an electrical turbine), CPV uses much less water and has a more distributed footprint. Given that the same areas that are good for solar power are also short on water resources, cutting water consumption by over 99% is a huge deal. In addition, environmentalists are already getting concerned about large swaths of desert being converted into solar thermal and standard solar PV farms, with the accompanying environmental degradation and loss of wild space. CPV, on the other hand, is more like wind turbines – they can be spread out and the area between and underneath CPV structures can still be used for other purposes.

As far as the energy economics of the technology, one company mentioned in the article did a “cradle-to-grave” energy analysis and found that it takes only six months for their CPV technology to start producing more energy than it took to create the CPV structure in the first place.

But as good as CPV appears to be, the Greenwire article points out that CPV suffers from the same problem that all solar does right now – it needs government support in order to survive long enough to become cost-competitive with other supplies like natural gas and coal (although it’s on track to reach parity with other solar technologies in the next year or two).

CPV sounds like a great technology to me because it appears to be far more environmentally friendly than solar thermal is. But in the energy sector, as with commercial commodity products, the best technology doesn’t always win in the end. Instead, marketing, financing, and political influence are greater indicators of success than low water consumption, a small carbon footprint, and a smaller physical footprint.

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Wind turbines may affect weather

If you’ve ever laid down on the ground during a windstorm, you probably noticed that wind at ground level is much slower than wind at head height or a couple of hundred feet in the air. This is the main reason that wind turbines are raised up on massive towers – the wind blows stronger and more consistently high above the ground, making the turbine more efficient as a result. Similarly, wind doesn’t blow through the forest itself as fast as it blows does through open clearings. And faster or slower wind speeds has an effect on the weather downwind.

According to the article, wind farms on the scale of North American storm systems has an appreciable affect, in this case defined as “larger than typical weather-forecast uncertainties,” with the effects felt not just in North America but also across the North Atlantic and on into Europe. Of course, the size of a storm system is very often tens of miles in diameter and can be hundreds of miles across, but if you covered the Midwest with turbines, well, that’s certainly going to be large enough to qualify.

What does this mean? Well, the scientists interviewed for the article said that the impacts on wind speed, cloudiness, and temperature, but that the impacts were small compared to the benefits of removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. Beyond that, though, the scientists weren’t comfortable speculating.

Perhaps I’m being a little too harsh on the study authors. They did run the geoengineering method through climate models in order to better understand how ocean acidification will be affected, and that’s valuable information to have. But the overall conclusion – changing solar insolation via geoengineering does nothing to stop ocean acidification – well, duh.

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New study on the PETM raises questions, but no answers

55 million years ago, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) produced between five and nine degrees Celsius of warming globally, and that warming lasted for tens of thousands of years. A new study published in Nature Geoscience investigated the PETM using a single climate model and claims to have found that CO2 alone was insufficient to have caused the PETM.

However, once you read the actual paper, it’s not quite that clear-cut. First off, the PETM happened during a geological era when the Pacific was much larger than it is today and the Atlantic was much smaller and the Earth was much warmer before the PETM than today. And the authors of the study acknowledge all these points:

Undoubtedly, the climatic boundary conditions before the PETM were different from today’s – including different continental configuration, absence of continental ice and a different base climate, which limits the PETM’s suitability as the perfect future analogue.” (emphasis mine)

Second, the study investigates a single climate model, rather than the many different climate models that are available. Even so, though, the study does raise a couple of important questions that really should be answered.

The first question is whether, as the authors claim, this study represents “a fundamental gap in our understanding” of climate that “needs to be filled to confidently predict future climate change.” It certainly suggests that we don’t understand enough, but is the problem our understanding of the PETM, our understanding of recent climate change, or both? At this point, there’s not enough information to know the answer to that question. After all, some scientists have suggested that climate models are insufficient to predict the long-term changes to the Earth’s climate resulting from anthropogenic CO2, and that over the next thousand years, CO2 will actually drive far more heating than it does over the next century.

The second question is whether this study supports the contention that climate models are underestimating the effects of anthropogenic climate disruption. The authors found that their climate model only accounted for approximately 3.5 degrees of the five to nine degrees of warming that actually occurred during the PETM. If this is accurate, then this study could mean that the models to date have underestimated the effect of CO2 emissions by 43% to 157%, and that climate disruption during the next century or two could be much, much worse than it is already expected to be.

Which question you focus on probably depends more on whether you’re a climate disruption “skeptic” or denier, or whether you’re a proponent of anthropogenic climate disruption.

The idea is to force the top billion or so people who are the highest CO2 emitters to cut their emissions, no matter where those emitters are located on the globe. The U.S. would still have a huge number of people who needed to cut their emissions (people like me, for example) somehow, but so would a large number of Chinese, most of the EU, Russia, and even a few countries in Africa and the Middle East. But this scheme would automatically exempt, at least to start with, the poorest countries and even permit them to increase their emissions. This scheme would also rope in developing nations as they started to reach the per-capita emissions cap, so a country like India that is presently mostly under the cap would find itself having to start paying automatically as their economy improves over the next several decades.

It’s an interesting idea, and given that it might enable real action on climate disruption and CO2 emissions, it’s certainly worth considering. I look forward to hearing more about it in the coming months, especially if it starts to get traction among climate policy wonks.

The turn-around occurred when the Chinese became unwilling to lend money to support the “American Dream”! Since that moment, life has changed on our planet, and the new, vegetarian, small-bodied, higher IQ individuals now rule! Since that moment, Zero-running cost, Zero upkeep, eco-ship style homes make sense, and the extravagant folly of the formerly worshiped “McMansion” has been revealed. After that point, where consuming oil on money borrowed from other nations, in inefficient gasoline cars becomes impossible, and paying in cash at the pumps will become an American reality, a new economy Hybrid, followed by a social pattern changing, totally electric car, is an absolute! Sewage bio-gassing and algae-oil as well as many other healthy home-grown fuel sources will come into common use, since buying petroleum with other’s money is now not possible! The magic balancing point where developing efficient rail transportation, to replace the fuel-extravaganza of intercity air travel has suddenly become a government mandate to maintain the current economy. Huge, home-built and home-fueled nuclear plants will soon dot the skylines of American cities, for energy survival sake! The small local underground reactor will replace corner gas stations and power hospitals, prisons, neighborhoods and farm districts for efficiency’s sake, and to keep the often charged battery cars running. Factories will build huge dormitories to lessen the strain of transportation to and from work, and a new morality for Americans – “good sexual behaviors” will spring up inside these dorms! Great underground settlements around the solar collectors in the deserts of America will spring up, complete with adjoining tunnels and work shifts organized to accommodate the solar peak power times – a gasoline-less world to be sure! Huge wind farms to be serviced by only the new “Brave and Masculine American Heroes” will take over whole country-sides, and provide heavy currents for new industry, set up in direct competition with China’s massive Nuclear installations. Great new riches will be gained by those educated few scientists developing means and ways of electricity, the new God in power for mankind, to serve people. We the American people have been broken of our “Oil Addiction” by the fact that we can no longer afford to pay for importing it, and will have to change over, now, to home-made forms of fuels, and like it or not, the Chinese by laughing out loud at Timmy Geithner, in Beijing, and turning down Obama’s overtures for more, massive, loans of dying dollars, were the final cure! Even OPEC and the Saudis will not extend oil without payment , not even to their oldest friends and trading partners, the U.S.A., when they can get cash, even if it is in “Yuan” from China.

That’s why it’s time to support clean coal technology. Once the Duke Energy’s Edwardsport IGCC plant in Indiana is completed (it’s on schedule for 2012), this IGCC plant will be one of the cleanest coal-based power plants in the world, producing 10 times as much power as the existing unit with 45 percent less carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced.

There are a lot of modifiers in your comment: “once”, “is completed”, “will be”, “one of the cleanest”, and number projections.

So what you’re saying is basically nothing. You don’t have a plant, you have a plan that a lot of people (except politicians…who aren’t really people) are very skeptical about. Have you really figured out what to do with all the captured baddies? It seems to me that private investors tend to flee from “clean coal” projects; what is the ACCCE’s projection for breaking even?

Hey, i get it…it’s something and it plays well in soundbites as it proposes a seemingly simple situation to a complex problem. So instead of telling us how great this will be, why don’t you show us it actually working; doing what you promise; and not being a complete money pit.

Oh, and you forgot to mention how the ACCCE plans to clean up the process of coal mining. Cutting a length from one end of the rope and splicing it to the other end does not make the rope longer.

Also, the moderator deleted your second comment – it was identical except for the first sentence, and so offered nothing new. It did, however, look like it might have been auto-generated. Which makes the moderator’s other observation that much more interesting – the IP address from which you posted both comments has been listed at spamcop, spamhaus XBL, SORBS, and the Composite Blocking List as a host responsible for sending spam and/or hosting a trojan site. So I’m curious – is the ACCCE contracting with someone who runs a likely illegal botnet, running the botnet themselves, or just hosting with someone who’s security is so bad that they’ve become a bot host?

Oh gosh, I will check with our tech people about us being bot hosts — that sounds awful.

I am with the American Coalition of Clean Coal Electricity. As you know, energy is a highly complex issue and cannot just be solved overnight. And in order to keep up with growing energy consumption, we’ll need to keep coal in the energy mix. It’s a reliable, abundant and affordable source of energy.

And whether you like it or not, developing countries like China and India have huge reserves of coal and they’re certainly using it. Chu warned that if China continued on its path, in 30 years it would have equaled all the carbon pollution the U.S. has ever released.

As for your questions, there are new regulations that carefully outline what can and cannot be done with regard to certain types of surface mining.

Those involved in the production of coal care about the environment, and that’s why they comply with current rules that require coal operators to establish a buffer around streams. There are other steps in place to make sure extraction is as clean as we can feasibly make it. And any project undertaken has the endorsement of the Army Corps of Engineers on ecological issues. You can read more about that at http://www.nma.org.